Epic Store adds more exclusives, including Control

A pair of new exclusives were announced today for the upstart Epic Store on the PC. And one of them is the pretty hotly anticipated Control.

Controlling retail

Does Steam have something to worry about with the Epic’s game store? It honestly kind of feels like they might. The new retail storefront has been adding exclusive titles aplenty, and that’s a little concerning.

Games like The Division 2 and Metro Exodus won’t appear on Valve’s Steam for a while, and now they’re getting Remedy Entertainment’s Control. And Journey to the Savage Planet will be right there with it. Both games come out of publisher 505 Games, and will be exclusives.

• Control: Set in a unique and ever-changing world that juxtaposes our familiar reality with the strange and unexplainable, Control is a third-person action-adventure game combining award-winning developer Remedy Entertainment’s trademark gunplay with supernatural abilities. In addition to PC, Control is confirmed for a simultaneous physical and digital retail launch on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in Summer 2019.

• Journey to the Savage Planet: The debut title from industry veterans Alex Hutchinson, Yassine Riahi and Reid Schneider’s Typhoon Studios is an upbeat first-person adventure game set in a bright and colorful alien world filled with weird and wonderful creatures, in which players are tasked with exploring, cataloguing alien flora and fauna and determining if the planet is fit for human habitation. In addition to PC, Journey to the Savage Planet is confirmed for launch on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Timed exclusivity

While they’ll start out exclusive, neither game will stay that way. As you probably guessed, the availability is timed. Though it’s not that short of a window. Don’t look for Steam to get either one of these for “at least 12 months”.

So with that in mind, does Valve have something to worry about? They’ve controlled the PC gaming space for so long, it’s hard to even imagine. With the level of exclusives Epic is racking up though, there could be a rumble brewing. It almost of feels like there might be an old school platform-battle taking shape. That’d be interesting.

And while it could be good for consumers, it could also easily favor publishers. PC games are almost exclusively digital these days after all, so options are limited for shoppers. If it took a certain track, we could see a battle of lower fees on the distribution end over falling prices on the retail side.

Stay tuned, this could all get very interesting.